A study published today found that when Twitter Inc. blocked engagement of former President Donald Trump’s election fraud claims, they were shared more often on other social media platforms.

The study, undertaken by researchers at New York University researchers and published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, endeavored to find out what happened when Twitter clamped down on some of Trump’s posts.

“We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies, attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely,” researchers said. “We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels.”

The research also found that if content had been blocked on Twitter, that content became more popular on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, more so than messages that had been left alone by Twitter or messages that had merely been labeled.

The researchers asked the question of how effective taking action on certain messages is if taking action on one platform actually leads to the content becoming more popular in the social media ecosystem. They also admitted that the findings can’t say whether the content that Twitter took action against would have become popular anyway, or whether it was the actual labeling or blocking that enhanced the spread of the posts.

“Our findings underscore the networked nature of misinformation: posts or messages banned on one platform may grow on other mainstream platforms in the form of links, quotes, or screenshots,” said the researchers. “This study emphasizes the importance of researching content moderation at the ecosystem level, adding new evidence to a growing public and platform policy debate around implementing effective interventions to counteract misinformation.”

Twitter offered a response to the study, saying that it took “swift enforcement action” on such posts, adding that it continues to research how best to prevent misinformation from causing online or offline harm. The company didn’t comment on the more complex matter of the possibility of its actions creating larger ripples in the ecosystem.

Photo: Alexander Shatov/Unsplash